The present invention relates to editing browser documents.
Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) documents are structured documents that generally include multiple components. Typically, these structured documents can be visualized by a conventional Internet browser, such as the Microsoft® Internet Explorer. In this specification, structured documents and components will also be referred to as browser documents and browser components, respectively. In typical browser documents, browser components are arranged in a tree structure. In the tree structure, a parent browser component can have multiple child browser components, thus defining a sub-tree. The root node in the tree structure corresponds to the browser document.
A browser document can be edited with conventional graphical editors, such as Microsoft FrontPage® for HTML documents. During editing of the browser document, these graphical editors also manage changes in the tree structure of the browser document, which can result, e.g., from moving, copying, or deleting a browser component. To manage the tree structure of the browser document, the graphical editor can use an HTML table tag for each browser component. The table tags are organized in a tree structure that corresponds to the tree structure of the browser components. Each table tag has a graphical representation, which the user can manipulate to place the corresponding browser component at a specific location within the graphical editor. The graphical editor recognizes plain HTML elements and assigns a corresponding table tag representation.